Upcoming Changes to Font Awesome

Announcements & Information
#1

Hello!

Font Awesome changes will be forthcoming in our next release of Backlight 5. There are a handful of motivating factors for these changes, including, but not limited to …

  • GDPR concerns, such those those voiced in threads such as this, and …
  • as a result, Font Awesome having become a support concern/headache both for ourselves and our users;
  • the fact that Kookaburra does not use Font Awesome at all, which is a part of …
  • a general interest in removing outside/third-party dependencies from Backlight;
  • Font Awesome Pro being a service expense for a service that I am no longer making active use of.

And so, the changes are that:

  • Font Awesome Free will replace our use of Font Awesome Pro.
  • Font Awesome Pro will be removed from Backlight.
  • Font Awesome icons will be sourced from local files, and no longer from an external CDN.
  • The appearance of some icons may change in Pangolin, and Backlight admin[^1].
  • Users having made extensive use of Font Awesome to decorate their site may find icons to be missing.

We hope these changes will be in the best interest of most Backlight users, though we fear this may not be the case for ALL Backlight users.

If these changes do cause issues for any one, please reach out to me directly and I will attempt to help you to resolve whatever problem.

And finally, should we happen to miss updating any icons – resulting in icons missing in Backlight’s admin, or on your websites, where they should appear – please let us know so that we can patch things up.

These are the icons that will remain available.

Cheers,
Matt

[^1]: For example, fa-image-polaroid icons are being replaced by fa-images.

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#2

If you’re adding icons with html like this: <i class="far fa-home"></i> and after the update your icons are missing, check the prefix. Icons with the “far” prefix are part of Pro. Try changing prefix to “fas”, that may solve it. (it does for the Home icon)
There’s a chart showing which prefixes are for the free version:

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#3

Or in your custom.css, Font Awesome 5 Pro needs to be replaced with Font Awesome 5 Free:

.theme:before {
	font-family: "Font Awesome 5 Free";
	font-weight: 900;
	content: "\f186";
}

The content field needs to be updated as well if the selected icon doesn’t exist in the free version.

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